X-Nico

5 unusual facts about Mark Crispin


Columbia MM

The message sequence feature proved so popular with MM users that TOPS-20 MM author Mark Crispin went on to implement similar filtering capabilities in Pine.

Internet Message Access Protocol

IMAP was designed by Mark Crispin in 1986 as a remote mailbox protocol, in contrast to the widely used POP, a protocol for retrieving the contents of a mailbox.

Mark Crispin

In the early 1980s, shortly after becoming the Systems Programmer for the Stanford Computer Science Department's TOPS-20 system, he became interested in electronic mail software and systems; thereafter this became his primary focus.

He developed the first production PDP-10 32-bit address ARPAnet NCP for the WAITS operating system, and wrote or rewrote most of the WAITS ARPAnet protocol suite.

During that time, he wrote the infamous RFC 748, the only document specifically marked in the RFC index with note date of issue; and a series of Telnet implementations for the Incompatible Timesharing System, WAITS, and TOPS-20 operating systems whose escape behavior was playfully immortalized by Guy Steele in the April 1984 Communications of the ACM as The Telnet Song.



see also